Researcher at Jakarta Field Station

David Gil

Thomas J. Conners

Betty Litamahuputty

Antonia Soriente

Uri Tadmor

The MPI EVA Jakarta Field Station

The MPI EVA Jakarta Field Station was set up in early 1999 by David Gil and Uri Tadmor as a project funded by the Department of Linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.

The Field Station's primary purpose was to collect large corpora of naturalistic language data. The three main research projects focus on the Acquisition of Jakarta Indonesian, Language Contact in Indonesia and Language Description.

In addition to the data collection and research activities of the Field Station, work was also being carried out on the development of a customised FileMaker database solution and set of tools for the coding and analysis of language data.

Field work in KalimantanThe Field Station's office is located on campus at Atma Jaya University in central Jakarta but data is being/has been collected in the field at various locations around Indonesia and Malaysia. Such places include Jakarta, Bandung, Semarang and Pemalang in Java, Palembang and Riau in Sumatra, Makassar in Sulawesi, Dayak villages in the highlands of East Kalimantan and Sarawak, villages in West Kalimantan, and Ternate in Northern Maluku.

Originally staffed by three people in Jakarta, the Field Station has evolved and grown and now has a full-time staff of sixteen (twelve Indonesians and four expatriates) as well as the project head based in Leipzig, two outside linguists based at the University of Delaware and two host linguists based at Atma Jaya University.

Data collection and transcription over the years since inception has accelerated and the Field Station now boasts the largest corpus of naturalistic child language data outside of Europe.

The MPI EVA Jakarta Field Station cooperated with the Center for Endangered Languages Documentation (CELD).